Kitty's Big Trouble

  He stepped inside. “Ready to go hunting?” He had his leather jacket and sunglasses in place, ready for action. He’d taken possession of the stake we’d found back in Kansas and had that hidden somewhere, and probably a few more stakes besides.

  Ben carried the semiautomatic pistol that normally lived in the glove box of the car in a shoulder holster under his blazer. It was loaded with silver bullets. Guns made me nervous, and I wasn’t sure if that was because I didn’t like guns, or I didn’t like how often we seemed to need them. I reassured myself that he probably wouldn’t have to use it.

  In addition, Cormac gave us all crosses on chains to wear. Just in case.

  I’d guessed that Roman had werewolf minions in town; we were going to try to flush them out. Not necessarily confront them—just see how many there were and what they were up to. Maybe follow them to Roman. If we found them first, they couldn’t jump us.

  The chances of finding anything in this huge, packed city were slim. So I kept telling myself.

  We planned to meet Anastasia a couple of hours after sunset at an address in Chinatown. That gave us some time to drive into the heart of the city, check out the area, watch for anything that seemed wrong. We decided to start in Fisherman’s Wharf and work our way south. After parking, Ben and I would go together; Cormac would follow separately. I didn’t like splitting up the pack. We needed to look out for each other. Safety in numbers.

  As we left the parking lot, I looked all around, taking in the sights and sounds of one of the most touristy locations in the country, squinting against a wind blowing off the water, watching gulls dive and soar. We’d already discussed the plan. I still tried to argue. “I’d feel better if we stuck together.”

  “Too obvious,” Cormac answered. “You two look fine as a couple. I don’t look like I belong with you.”

  “But—”

  “He’s right,” Ben said.

  I wore jeans and a light blue blouse; Ben wore khaki slacks and a button-up shirt and blazer. Give us sunglasses and a couple of cameras and we’d look like yuppie tourists. On the other hand, Cormac looked like he ought to be riding a Harley on some dusty back road.

  “I’ll keep you in sight, but don’t go looking for me. Got it?” Cormac patted a couple of pockets, as if checking for something. He nodded, apparently satisfied, and walked off in the opposite direction from us.

  In ten minutes, Ben and I reached the waterfront around Fisherman’s Wharf. The place was crowded, chaotic, lots of traffic, cars crammed together in makeshift parking lots, a mix of buildings from every decade for the last century, restaurants and junk shops, hotels and offices. Piers crammed with boats: sailboats, fishing boats, tour boats. And people. This late in the day, there seemed to be a ton of screaming children who were too tired and hungry to be interested in cotton candy anymore. I stuck close to Ben, our arms touching as we walked.

  “No werewolf in his right mind is going to be stalking us here,” Ben said. “This place is a zoo.”

  “Well, we know that now,” I said. In fact, this area might be a good place to hide if we wanted to avoid werewolves.

  I had a vague sense of Cormac walking about a block behind us. I had to resist an urge to glance over my shoulder, to check my hunch. My senses were going haywire with all the sensory input. Cars, trucks, buses all made different sounds, had slightly different-smelling exhausts. Music from distant radios clashed. Streetlights, traffic lights, signal lights. Dozens of buildings, and every one had a different set of signs, and rows of windows looked down on us. And the people. Hundreds of people, who all looked and smelled different, who spoke a half dozen different languages. It felt like getting trapped in the middle of a herd of cows.

  All big cities shared certain characteristics—lots of buildings, lots of cars, a myriad of scents, from gas fumes to pigeon droppings. It was what made them big cities. So I was amazed at how different San Francisco smelled from Denver. I probably would have noticed it even if I hadn’t been a werewolf, but having a werewolf’s sensitive nose made the odors obvious. In Denver, I could always catch hints of mountains and prairie around the smog and steel of the city. The wind brought tastes of the surrounding countryside. Here, I could hardly even smell the concrete and asphalt smells of the city. Mostly, I smelled the ocean, saltwater and fish, a slightly rotten smell of decay in the water, pollution from all the shipping and traffic. The smell was strange, alien; my nose constantly twitched, trying to define and recognize its various textures. I walked with my shoulders bunched up, tense.

  “I can’t smell anything but fish,” I said. Anything upwind of us would be invisible under the breeze from the water.

  “Yeah. It’s going to be tough spotting anything sneaking up on us from the wrong direction.” He scanned the streets ahead of us, noting the people and storefronts we passed. He wasn’t hiding his nerves any better than I was.

  “I’m not even sure what we’re looking for.”

  “Anything that doesn’t smell right,” he said.

  “That’s everything here. Makes me want to go home.”

  He squeezed my hand. “It’s kind of making me hungry. We’re going for seafood for dinner, right?”

  “It would be a crime not to, I think.”

  We ducked down a side street—a length of boardwalk along a pier, really—to get away from the crowd for a moment, catch our breath, and take stock. The air seemed a little fresher away from all the people, but the ocean wind still wouldn’t tell us anything about what was lurking in the city.

  Across the water, toward the west, I spotted the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted against the setting sun. There was a sight to mark off the bucket list.

  Further on, I was drawn by a guttural, animal noise. I wouldn’t have noticed it, or I’d have written it off as a weird dog barking, except that it was so strange.

  Ben and I turned a corner, looked over a wooden railing, and saw a blanket of brownish, rubbery sea lions splayed out on a series of anchored platforms floating on the water. They were all gurgling and bellowing, craning their necks back and wriggling whiskered snouts.

  “Huh,” Ben observed. Both of us were native Coloradoans. The scene before us—the massive marine creatures lounging and stretching, shaking their whiskers and blinking up at the pier full of gawking tourists—was completely alien.

  “I wonder if any of them are lycanthropes?” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Ben said.

  I was studying the smaller ones that seemed as if they only weighed as much as an average person as opposed to the massive ones that weighed hundreds of pounds—and trying to catch the right smell to indicate that there was something supernatural going on.

  “You know, were–sea lions.” I’d met a were-seal once, and was open to endless possibilities.

  “Why would a were–sea lion hang out with a bunch of the real thing?”

  “Hiding out? Maybe Roman has were–sea lion minions.”

  “I think you’re stretching,” he said.

  We continued on, leaving the waterfront and sea lions behind to enter the grid of streets and buildings with kitschy souvenir shops, crowded restaurants, and tourist traps. Telegraph Hill and its ornamental Coit Tower lay to the south. If we kept walking, we’d enter the hills and warrens of the next neighborhood. So far, no werewolves. This wasn’t exactly werewolf territory. I wasn’t disappointed. We had plenty of other neighborhoods to check.

  After a couple of blocks, Ben’s phone rang. He answered, and Cormac’s voice responded.

  I waited while Ben made yes and no noises and suggested getting back to the car and heading to Chinatown. We’d left the crowds behind on the Wharf. The sun was setting; dusk fell faster among the buildings, away from the water. Lots of corners, shadows, and hiding places here. It made me think of a forest, with wide trees and deep ravines. We were strangers here, outside our territory. My shoulders stiffened, like hackles rising. All I could smell was city and ocean. I paced a few steps up the street and ba
ck, as if that would make me see into the shadows more clearly.

  “You okay?” Ben said, shutting off his phone and slipping it into his pocket.

  “Just nervous.”

  Picking up on my cues, he lifted his chin, gazing around, searching as I had. “Let’s keep moving, then.”

  Hand in hand, we walked down the street and back toward the waterfront parking lot where we’d left the car. “Did he spot anything?”

  “It didn’t sound like it,” Ben said. “He didn’t say much.”

  Cormac never did.

  Another characteristic all big cities seemed to share was a visible homeless population, and San Francisco was no different. The street people here looked the same as they did everywhere, bundled in ill-fitting clothing, hunched over, tired-seeming. Identifiable not just by the way they looked but by the way they moved, at a different pace and with a different purpose than the people around them. My inner Wolf perked her ears when we passed them, because they didn’t quite fit. They were eddies in the flow of life on the street.

  A man with a matted beard, knit gloves, hat, and a green coat of heavy canvas was slowly making his way up the other side of the street. I glanced at him, started to look away, then paused. Wolf didn’t just perk her ears; my shoulders stiffened, hackles going up. Something was definitely wrong. Ben’s hand tightened on mine.

  “Are we being followed?” I murmured.

  “Look,” he murmured back.

  A second figure, this one with a stubbled face, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, had joined the first, who had changed direction. They were now walking shoulder to shoulder—moving with purpose and direction. They didn’t look like street people anymore, and that put Wolf on alert. Under their loose clothes they were broad-chested, powerful.

  At this distance, and with all the interference, I couldn’t smell them. But with their steady pacing and bunched shoulders, they walked like werewolves. We were being stalked.

  We didn’t change our pace or direction, giving no indication we’d spotted them. At the moment we were on a side street, little traveled and currently empty. In a few minutes we’d be near the water again, where there was more traffic and more people. Not to mention we’d be heading toward Cormac. Get our pack together, then turn on them. Ben reached for the gun.

  But these were wolves on the hunt, which meant some of them had the job of getting us to run and chasing us down. And somewhere, another wolf had the job of flanking us.

  That one stepped around the next corner and into our path.

  Chapter 5

  TALL AND FULL of muscles, he was a white guy with a dark crew cut, square jaw, and a wry smile. His T-shirt was tight, his jeans faded. Bully. Enforcer.

  We stopped, squaring ourselves before him. Somehow we managed to stay calm. Tilting my head as if curious, I regarded the stranger. Ben smirked as if bored. We were posturing, showing dominance—but we couldn’t hide our emotions. He would hear our heart rates speeding up, smell the sweat of tension breaking out. See our shoulders tightening, stiff as hackles. But we stood our ground. Running would only encourage him. Ben held the gun at his side, finger on the trigger.

  “Is there a problem?” I said.

  Ben glanced over his shoulder—the other two werewolves were crossing the street, moving in behind us.

  “I have a message from Roman,” the guy said.

  When Ben started to raise the gun, I touched his arm, forestalling him. “What message?”

  The guy bared his teeth and sprang, hands outstretched, fingers clenched like claws. I ruined Ben’s first shot with my arm in the way, and the second missed because the guy was fast and already on top of us, knocking the weapon out of Ben’s hand. I went sideways, dodging—Ben dived in the opposite direction as the two others grabbed at him. I couldn’t see where the gun had gone.

  The big guy snagged me as I swerved, taking hold of my arm, swinging me around the corner and into the side street he’d come out of. I slammed into the wall, banging my head and seeing stars. Falling, I dropped into a crouch and growled, glaring up at my attacker.

  Ben tackled him.

  Caught off guard, the big guy fell, and the two rolled onto the pavement. The other two jumped on top of him. Letting out a guttural shout, I lunged into the fray, slashing with inadequate fingernails instead of claws. My only thought: to get them away from Ben, to drive them off. Taking hold of a handful of hair, I yanked back—the first henchman’s face came up, his teeth bared to show the start of fangs, which snapped at me, millimeters from my arm. I let him go and raked claws across his cheek. The second henchman kicked me, and I fell against the wall again.

  We all looked human, but we fought like wolves, with lupine strength and speed. Instead of throwing punches, we slashed, snapped, wrestled. Instead of grunting and shouting, we growled and snarled. I could feel Ben’s anger lashing out at them; my own rage narrowed my vision to the three enemy wolves and my need to rip into them.

  Ben managed to wrestle out from under the pile of bodies. Lips drawn back to show teeth, face contorted in fury, he grabbed the head of the one who had his hands on me and wrenched. With a yelp, the guy fell over, scrambling to regain his balance.

  A shadow and the scent of a newcomer—human—appeared at the end of the street. The intrusion was shocking to all of us; we broke apart, separating into our packs. Ben and I stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the three men fanned out before us.

  The figure at the end of the street was Cormac. The smell of him boosted me, giving me the confidence to turn on our attackers.

  “Message from Roman, huh?” I shouted at them. “Screw that!”

  They were wary of Cormac, glancing at him when they weren’t staring at me. Backing away from us both, they finally broke and ran around the next corner.

  I would have chased them, but Ben fell to his knees, groaning. He smelled of blood, seeping out of cuts across his face and the chest of his torn shirt. And he smelled of fur. Agitated, he struggled out of his blazer—also torn—and yanked at the strap of the gun holster, trying to pull it off. His hands showed wolf’s claws, and tawny fur brushed his arms.

  Cormac did chase them, to the corner at the next block, but he stopped and looked back when Ben fell.

  “Ben, no,” I said, crouching before him and clutching his arms. His muscles were taut, bracing against the need to shape-shift.

  He clamped shut his eyes, grit his teeth, and doubled over, hugging himself, as if he could hold it inside. Trying to hold the wolf in when the Change was so far along hurt—so much easier to let it go. We were in the middle of San Francisco—he had no place to run. We weren’t safe. I folded myself over him, holding him as much as I could, helping him. Resting my face on his shoulder, I murmured at him, letting my breath caress him so he could smell me trying to give comfort, to anchor him.

  “Keep it together,” I said. “Hold it in, please Ben, hold tight.”

  His body trembled. I couldn’t tell if he was shaking from shock, or if that was his wolf breaking free of his human skin. I thought he was going to burst. His breaths came in rapid, heavy gasps.

  Cormac approached.

  “No!” I shouted at him. “Stay back!” I might have snarled, baring my teeth at him, threatening.

  Ben threw his head back and screamed. I held tight, my arms wrapped around his body; no matter what happened I’d keep holding. He clung back, and the scream faded to a moan.

  “Please stay with me,” I breathed against his ear.

  We stayed like that for such a long time. My legs cramped, the pavement bruised my knees, but I didn’t dare move in case it pushed him over the edge. I had to wait, hoping he trusted me, felt safe with me, and pulled himself home.

  Then, Ben’s hands closed over my arms. And they were hands, with human fingers and no claws. His breathing slowed. Inch by inch, muscles released, softening. He leaned against me instead of holding himself rigid.

  Kneeling in front of him, I put my hands against his cheeks. He w
as chilled and sweaty. I tried to press warmth into him, to make his face relax along with the rest of him. Sweat soaked his hair.

  “Look at me,” I whispered. He showed me hazel eyes, catching what little light still reached us to glow gold. Exhaustion, sadness pulled at his features. “Shh, you’re fine, you came back to me. It’s okay.” I kept murmuring until he could do more than stare at me.

  He collapsed into my arms. “Kitty,” he moaned, his arms squeezed tight around me, hands clenched against me. I hugged back, my eyes stinging with tears. This had been so close, but we were both human now, solid and human, body against body.

  “It’s okay,” I said, my face against his neck, skin to skin. I licked his chin, a wolfish gesture. He tipped his head to catch my lips with his and we kissed, needy and relieved.

  Maybe he believed me, maybe he was all right. But he didn’t let go.

  I glanced up; Cormac waited patiently at the end of the alley, keeping his distance. That prompted Ben to turn, to follow my gaze. He quickly looked away again, leaning his head against my shoulder.

  “How is he?” Cormac called.

  “How are you?” I whispered to Ben. He shook his head, but heaved a sigh, and the last of the rage and terror left him. When he pulled away from me, I felt cold.

  He met my gaze. “That was too close.” His voice scratched, rough from growling.

  “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my arms, returning to warmth.

  “They wanted to hurt you.”

  “They didn’t. I’m fine.” He rubbed a spot on my jaw, and the skin stung. A scratch or cut. So they’d gotten me. “I’m sorry—I should have let you shoot him.”

  He shook his head. “He was faster than me—they all were. I’d have missed.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, pushing to my feet, holding my hand to him. We helped each other up.

  We faced Cormac, who just stared. I couldn’t guess what he thought of this.

  “I had you in sight,” the hunter said, breaking the silence. “Spotted them just as they moved on you.”